Our industry exists in an antiblack world, and itself perpetuates anti-blackness in its structures and the limited scope of stories for Black voices. Against this background, we want to interrogate our own relationship to audiocraft, our aesthetic responsibilities and priorities. 

There are endless ways we could list our bad experiences as Black makers in this industry—and many of our colleagues have painstakingly documented their challenges. Producer and editor CC Paschal, author of a forthcoming book about audiocraft, documented their history of workplace advocacy, professional accomplishments and healing from toxic work cultures. The producers of Louder Than A Riot dedicated space in the final episode of the program’s run to talking about the structural barriers they dealt with, alongside the editorial constraints that they worked to free themselves and their subjects from. Forthcoming is the PhD dissertation from Sylvie Carlos on the experiences of Black audio producers, and the recurring struggles they face in making audio. We ourselves have written countless emails and had endless phone calls and meetings with our senior editors and executives about editorial whiteness and how much that informs expectations of how we are supposed to tell stories. These experiences take up so much life energy and creative headspace. As makers who love this medium, we’ve been challenging ourselves to instead ask who and what we are making for. What informs our sense of good work, of good craft? Between us, we seem to agree that in our industry there are Common Sense ideas about what constitutes a Good program or feature. And it frequently happens that during the course of production or in the middle of industry discourse, ideas about what makes something Good can feel alien, violent or not quite right to us. Which begs the question:

Why has the language of audio—its formulas, its codes, aesthetics—remained uninterrogated?

[prompt: the sound of stretched side-eye muscle]

At its most basic, we can understand craft as the way we use sound to build worlds. This includes our artistic and curatorial choices; and the editorial, cultural and cognitive processes we use to make decisions. This might include the way we use sound to convey danger, lightness, love, fear, acceptance, rage or pivotal realizations. It is pace, silence and space.

Craft is also about aesthetics, which, aside from simply being about artistic sensibilities, are also fundamentally about principles and values. Aesthetics are deeply political and a structuring force. They come with rules, logic, and formulae. These are the blocks we use to create worlds in audio. Aesthetics tell us something about desire and power; they are a mirror to the dynamics, histories, hierarchies and priorities that exist in the world around us. There are storytelling tables, story arcs, the idea of jeopardy, tension, and time. 

Craft is about how we play with sound (think of the numerous creative prompts offered up by audio playground, Telling Stories, and the provocations of Sara Brooke Curtis). Craft in sound might also be about musicality and the aesthetic horizons we aim for as artists working in this medium. Here, we might point to Seán Street’s advocating for “a poetics of radio” or Alan Hall’s call to “compose with sound.” There’s the crafted approach to narration or the sleight-of-hand tools we use to propel our stories and scenes. Here, we could turn to the inventiveness of Short Cuts and Lights Out, the classic Radio Ballads, and the format pioneered by George The Poet.

Craft pulls us into the realm of beauty: a zone where the immaterial is made something close to audible. But craft can also be hallucinogenic, an opiate obscuring all kinds of dynamics, relations and expectations. 

We recognize that craft is full of possibility, but that possibility also includes violence. Craft is often presented as a neutral tool, a set of objective methods to build with. But in thinking about the political dimensions of aesthetics, we know that craft is not neutral. There is a politics to sound, and a reason why particular sonic palettes have become standard, and why particular approaches to storytelling and narration have become so ubiquitous. 

When we think about our relationship to what has been presented to us as craft, it has, at times, been a device to police, flatten, and erase. A means to close doors instead of a means of finding more doorways. Craft can operate as a border guard or as a defence of something. Over time we have understood that something to be whiteness: craft is deployed as a tool to reconcile to whiteness the experiences we share, the stories we tell and the worlds we try to build. In their Prix Nova acceptance speech, Axel described whiteness as “not [being solely about] skin tone but a socio-economic terrorism that is capitalist, ableist, misogynist, racist, homophobic and destroying every ecosystem on this planet.” Craft can also be the means we use to maintain, uphold and extend these systems of oppression. 

In her 1992 collection, Playing In The Dark, Toni Morrison traces how Black characters and blackness had been depicted in and utilized through American literary craft. She explored how both Black figures and blackness in these traditions were central to the fashioning of the very idea of America—an American public, an American reader and American ideals of freedom. Morrison argues that readers and writers were presumed to be white and enjoy an unquestioned, “raceless” ubiquity. She writes: “I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination.” There was a critical need to think about craft, history and politics together vigorously in order to: “learn how to maneuver ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains.”(1) Throughout the text, Morrison is a writer who loves words but refuses to look away from the context she is creating in, the Euro-American heritage of literary craft and its attendant histories. It's necessary to think about craft in relation to history, culture and politics: these are the foundations of the conventions that become crystallized over time.

Much like Morrison, we have considered what it means that our audiences are usually presumed to be white—we have often been told that is who we are making work for—and what that means for our imaginations in audio. If craft is about ethics, aesthetics, rules, desire and power, then audiocraft having its foundations in whiteness and empire means that it becomes an extension of what already exists in the world. 

White audiocraft is our attempt at naming the totalizing forces that come together in our industry to shape how programs are made. It allows us to name the cultural conventions, assumptions, unconscious desires and projections that shape the editorial, sonic and thematic ideas we have about what makes audiowork “Good.” It helps us to pinpoint the histories and locations that inform taste and what to prioritize. White audiocraft helps us to locate our medium within unjust societal structures and name it as a force that perpetuates those same structures both on and off tape. White audiocraft refers to the hierarchies, organizational structures, economies and relational dynamics that underpin editorial productions. 

White audiocraft also helps us to name the narrow ways that global majority voices, talent and their stories are taken up by an industry that simultaneously exploits, excludes, undermines and tokenizes them. 

The Palestinian-American writer Fargo Tbakhi describes craft as “the network of sanitizing influences exerted on writing in the English language: the influences of neoliberalism, of complicit institutions, and of the linguistic priorities of the state and of empire.” Some examples of white audiocraft include British-Somali audiomaker Fatuma Khareih’s observation that  “we’re often told ‘show, don’t tell,’ but even that idea is political—you can trace it back to anti-communist CIA programmes that emerged in Iowa in the 1950s during the Cold War.” In a similar vein, the Palestinian-American poet Noor Hindi’s poem Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying points to another core conceit of craft: the emphasis on depoliticized feeling over fact, as if politics, thinking and feeling cannot co-exist or inform one another. It also points to abstractions of real experiences into romantic scenes and sequences to placate white audiences. White audiocraft pushes us towards universalism and objectivity. We are told our audiences don’t have the capacity for complexity. We are pushed towards what some call “story”— neat conclusions where there are none, or an overemphasis on individual narratives. 

Audiocraft isn’t raceless territory. Many global public radio models emerged in the context of histories of empire and colonialism. Our current industry has followed suit, having been consolidated, as Maya Goldberg-Safir put it, over the last 60 years by overwhelmingly “white, highly educated, well-off baby boomers.” Audiocraft has been shaped by generations of skilled, mostly white makers, which has, in turn, shaped the ethics and aesthetics of the medium. In this history, people of color were largely subjects to capture, to make sense of, to translate, to project onto; and in the contexts of production, were rarely taking stewardship of their own stories. In this history, Black people were often not imagined as being part of the public, which is always already white in the audio imaginary. Rather, Black people were subjects to be documented, offered up on a plate to white middle-class audiences curious about “others.” 

Just as the public is always already presumed to be white, the voice we occupy when we write radio scripts, the questions we ask, and the balance we are asked to strike all emerge from whiteness. To quote Rebecca Mead’s 2018 New Yorker article How Podcasts Became a Seductive—and Sometimes Slippery—Mode of Storytelling, the “ubiquitous” voice and narrative style of many productions and features is one of a “sensitive, hesitating, transparently liberal male.” It must be noted, too, how much white women and non-binary people are able to hide behind rhetoric around sexism in order to ignore their role in shaping and maintaining the boundaries of craft. 

In Playing in the Dark, Morrison also traced the tropes of Black characters that emerged in American literary craft. The ways that Black characters were deployed as devices, or what she referred to as “metaphorical shortcuts'' to explore particular emotions: “notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread.” In a similar way, we have come to recognize a Bechdel-test-style list of limited stories for Black makers and the ways our stories can be imagined in sound. We are often commissioned to make in the register of whiteness. This is often further exacerbated when Black talent is on the mic working with all-white production teams, but the conventions of white audiocraft run so deep that non-white teams also practice white audiocraft. We learn its ways to get ahead, to maintain relationships so we aren’t seen as difficult and sometimes our mastery of white audiocraft can be weaponized against other people of color. 

We are often pushed towards commissions and assignments where we voice anxieties about “belonging” and where we examine our experiences in particular industries. We might get to talk about our hair, sport or entertainment or offer exoticized explications to white listeners about immigrant experience or homogenized “communities.” We might play the friendly neighborhood interlocutor for white listeners, or get placed in paternalistic dynamics with white presenters, producers or editors who, more often than not, need us for “access,” or to fulfill a predetermined vision they have about our experiences. In these stories, we are engaged in repetitive craftwork—we reproduce images and patterns of relation, and we tidy the boxes we have been given to work within. Rarely do we have the space to put forward properly researched ideas without them being reduced as overly polemic or opinionated. Rarely do we have space to freely play, daydream or aimlessly ruminate. 

We as audiomakers have been maneuvering to find freedom in sound from the constraints of industry convention, finding ways in our careers to be students of people who cannot see, let alone hear us. As Morrison wrote, there is also the ethical question of what we participate in as Black makers. Success is often measured by gushing praise from white producers telling us how “urgent,” “important” and “vital” our work is—and those responses are often about how much space we have made for whiteness, for familiarity in our work. As Tbakhi argues, “craft success is contingent upon ethical and political failure.”

[prompt: the sound of dub poetry leaking on a mixing desk short-circuiting the board]

they ask me to remember

but they want me to remember

their memories

and i keep on remembering

mine.

– why some people be mad at me sometimes by Lucille Clifton (2)

What Clifton tells us in that poem perfectly crystalizes why we’re met in newsrooms, audio production companies and arts institutions with push-backs such as, “I don’t want it to be too depressing,” “I don’t want the listener to feel bad,” “I don’t want to feel forced to eat my vegetables.” There is never any question about whiteness. We are just given the favorite recital song of liberals everywhere that begins:  "I know I’m a white …”, as  the useless platitude fades away into business as usual, everything still intact. 

[prompt: the sound of tired gays looking for nirvana in the depths of winter]

At a house party, four of us queers are huddled around whisky sours and warming hummus. Everyone is talking about how they have been overdubbed by the violence of white audiocraft. We are sharing war stories—here are just a few:

It is 2021. One year after George Floyd’s murder, we are making a special. White audiocraft says, let's play the tape in full, all 9 minutes of this man losing his life, for “impact.”

Maneuver: What's the best way to tell this white woman who will get defensive because she is used to being trusted with Black stories? So many of us do not trust her. 

It is 2019. A white woman is about to helm a series on slavery. She jokes, “It's interesting, isn’t it, I just never think about slavery.”

Maneuver: Find gentle ways to pull at the threads of this unthinking, non-thinking about Empire. Even when her jaw tightens, and she says we don’t have time, before apologizing a few days later. Maybe we should have people of color? Maybe the white experts shouldn't be given automatic trust. Maybe the people of color are more than just “opinionated”?

[prompt: primal screams on loop] 

It is 2022. Another series about slavery. These guys want to get it right. They don’t. 

Maneuver: Colorism, patriarchy and performative journalism means we get nowhere. How does a series attempting to shed light on the violence of plantations and racial capitalism reproduce those very logics? We get nowhere. 

It is 2023. We are tired and reluctant to do this again. To have to sit in front of another white man justifying his own ignorance because he has the power to. To watch them pontificate about colonial institutions and diversity and change, even as they make editorial judgment calls that uphold the systems they claim to critique. 

[maneuver as prompt: what does an audio coop sound like? What kind of work would it produce, what  systems and relationships would it foster?]

To riff with Clifton, to remember our own stories often puts us in conflict with craft. We know there are other ways the world can be arranged, that we can introduce complexity and consider relational dynamics in the way we make. To remember is to destabilize. To remember is a call to move away from what we have been told.  But where to? One possible horizon arrives by way of Tbakhi, who asks that we “betray craft by replacing it with political thought.”

[prompt: the sound of a knife staring at you] 

To betray craft would mean “playing in the dark,” as Morrison did. To ask what else there is for us, to develop a consciousness of the binds we can get trapped in as Black makers. To betray craft would be to recognize how much our aesthetic leanings are shaped by systems of oppression and to create new aesthetic paradigms and world orders based on liberation, pluralism and dignity. 

This piece is called WHITE NOISE, not Black Noise, not Humanity’s Noise, WHITE NOISE…[it’s a] tyranny of Whiteness.

It’s the ideology of scarcity that made me subject to a defensiveness about [my] title, WHITE NOISE, a defensiveness towards my specificity regarding how I relate to a system that tries to kill me every day, not realizing that it’s also killing you, too. You who are racialized as white are believed to be invisible and universal. You are not invisible. You are not safe. I have listened to too many reminders of fascists and populist memories during this festival to believe that any of us are safe so long as any of you want to be White.

—Axel Kacoutié (from their Grand Prix Nova acceptance speech in 2023 for their piece, WHITE NOISE) 

To borrow from Christina Sharpe, we wonder what narrative reparations might look like—what might happen if our craft was pointed toward care and regard? What kind of work would we make if we paid more attention to power across production? If we could be honest about positionality? We are not advocating for a new singular approach to craft but multiple—we want all the doors of the cosmos to burst open. We want a plurality of experience that holds us in our many faces and the destabilizing of narrow cannons. What might self-contained Black worlds that just get to be sound like? Worlds soundtracked by their own rain, questions, heartbreaks and joys? British-Nigerian producer Deborah Shorindé’s  Big Mummy is one such beautiful example.

We’re curious about craft that offers new possibilities of relation. How else might we create outside of standard producer-contributor relations? And how might we do so ethically? Here we think about Surviving Society, who use audio as a tool for political education and solidarity building. There's also the work of climate activist Joycelyn Longdon who is collaborating with communities in Ghana with audio storytelling to create interventions in the climate crisis. 

We are asking for craft that works as hard as it can, not only to avoid reproducing violence but also to actively seek to create new structures and possibilities on and off tape. Think of the Reply All series, on an intrepid quest to expose racism, only for stories to emerge about their own racist and union busting work culture. We imagine a practice of craft that takes seriously its capacity to produce harm. We have worked on productions that have won multiple awards, but the participants and producers working on them do not partake in the celebration because of their experiences of extraction, the labor of their time, and the exploitation of their ongoing stories for white listeners.  We do not want beautifully crafted lies, or sweet sounding weapons. We imagine a craft that respects the dead and fights with the living. We are leaning towards practices of craft that recognize other organizing principles for life: other living and evolving mythologies, cosmologies, linguistic logics and traditions.  We’re excited by the craft dreams complied in weird noise, and the invitations emerging from makers like Sayre Quevedo and Ariana Martinez. We imagine craft that, as Sandhya Dirks offers in Listening is an Act of Power, “learn(s) to hear how power works.”

We’re excited about craft that makes space for complexity, like The Trojan Horse Affair  or the Julius Eastman episode of Sounds Gay. Both these programs allowed tension and a critical look at whiteness to shape the craft of episodes instead of shying away. In the final episode of Louder Than A Riot, the production team, who had just found out they were to be included in company-wide layoffs, shared their reflections on producing the final series:

“I think the issues that we're interrogating stretch beyond just the reporting in the show, but we really try to call out structural imbalances in our lives, at NPR, in podcasting and in hip-hop with this show. And it's very difficult work. It's very draining and demanding work, but I think we were very supportive to each other throughout that…we were so committed also to telling the stories exactly how we wanted to tell them. And it also kind of makes me feel a little sad because I'm not sure when the next time I'll be in a position where I can tell stories exactly this way, with this level of resources and at the same time challenging the structures that be.”

We’re curious about abolitionist approaches to craft and how craft might work as a space of rehearsal. 

Here, we think of artists in the Disability Justice movement, where art is an embodied practice as a means of survival, wayfinding and waymaking. For instance, the writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about echotextia, an autistic poetic format that stretches and plays with language to make way for anti-capitalist, neurodivergent styles of communication. 

Poetry is practice. Craft is not divorced from our experiences, but is woven into how we live, what we aspire to and how we make. This model of craft doesn’t fall into the lazy conceit that passively bearing witness is enough, but this version of craft is participatory and invites doubt, curiosity, openendedness, mess, conflict, adaptability and a rebalancing of hierarchies.

Could we create in a community rather than an industry? Could we truly be free, where we are liberated from content production, deadlines and profit margins? Could we rewild audio making, where we no longer produce a dominant crop but symphonies that are good for you? 

Postscript 

A friend in writing this was the character Hi Man from Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In Note 2 of her book Ordinary Notes—an exquisite set of craft maps—Christina Sharpe describes how this character’s morning and evening calls would offer a counterpoint in sound to the violence taking place in the Georgia prison where he and other Black inmates also served as enslaved laborers. Sharpe writes, “his held note establishes a connection among the men…with that note they are held.” 

Eventually his call signals their collective escape. Imagine that register. 

This ‘note’ is one that offers another trajectory for craft—sounds that move in the direction of solidarity, agency, refusal, love and connection. A note that reckons with reality even as it imagines something else, a note that can play and resonate with its kin, and maybe with others. A sound that offers both something close to reprieve, that travels through the air with tenderness. A sound that could organize a prison break. 

Black music—in all its variations, blueprints, whispers, stylistic innovations, rhythms and technologies—has been another friend in writing this. Chief visionary Sun Ra once said, “There are other worlds out there they never told you about.” Perhaps as children of otherwhere, an important job is to remember that so many of us enter into this industry already knowing that. Remembering that we have our own wellsprings to draw from, listen to and create with. 

The artist June Tyson who sang with Sun Ra Arkestra offers another mantra for craft: 

Somebody else′s idea of somebody else's world

Is not my idea of things as they are

Somebody else′s idea of things to come

Need not be, the only way

To vision the future

What seems to be, need not be

What need, had to be

For what was, is only because of

An adopted source of things

Some chosen source, as was

Need not be, the only pattern

To build a world on